Grail - Elizabeth Bear [19]
That he could smile for. “Cheap sport,” he said. “I’d have thought such an easy opponent beneath you.”
She stood and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I’ve got to keep in trim for the aliens. So what do we recommend to the Captain?”
The Captain, their daughter. “We’re going to have to meet with them,” Benedick said. “Especially when we’re asking to share a planet, because I don’t think they’ll cede either of those two potentially habitable worlds to us entirely. It’s not human nature.”
“So even if they are inhumanly gracious, we’re going to have to live with them.”
“And when we do, we need to be aware of and guarded against all the possibilities for disaster.”
Caitlin turned her head, glancing over her shoulder at the system diagrams spinning with stately indifference in the big image tank. “I hope we’re aware of that,” she said. “I hate to think we’re underselling it to ourselves.”
Very little in the world knows more about keeping quiet than does a library.
Dust, who had been a library once, huddled in his ringspotted fur coat, paws dry-washing, all the active senses that might have told him enough about his environment to move in safety drawn inward, turned passive, locked down. He felt the new Angel all around, the web of her presence a veil made of trip wires and snares. If she found him she would eat him, as she had eaten most of him already. As she had eaten every other angel and remnants of angels she had found. If she found him, she would devour him whole. So, with perfect logic, he decided she would not find him at all.
The world had changed from what he knew. While he died, slept, and grew back from a spark, it had evolved from a hulk to a haven, from a shell to a ship.
Who had preserved the spark of him? And who had caused it to awaken here, into the helpful-animal consciousness of this furry toolkit with its deft hands and keen, twitching nose?
And who had thought that this, the eve of landfall, would be an opportune time to return him from the quiet cold of storage?
It seemed to Dust that, first, he must learn who had preserved him, and what that person or those persons intended. And then, having done that, he must decide how he was going to use those intentions to suit his own designs.
Dust was small now. Dust scurried. Dust moved without notice through the channels in the walls of the world. Dust only half recollected himself, but from what he remembered of the angel he had been, he would have left himself resources. Resources baled, blindered, and buried against future need. He had always been a hoarder—that was also after the nature of libraries.
His spotted pink and brown nose twitched. He sniffed, careful of whose spores he brought into the lungs of his insufficient, temporary form. If he could not extend his senses out into the world for fear of drawing the new Angel’s attention, he’d bring the world into himself and parse it that way. Primitive, but it should be effective enough if he were painstaking and meticulous.
He’d find the resources. He’d answer the questions. He’d learn who had brought him back.
He’d reclaim his ship, and he’d win his freedom again.
Dust filtered mouse-soft into the cracks in the walls and was gone.
Caitlin Conn did not have to travel from Engine to the Bridge to speak to, or even to see, her daughter. But she often did, walking down the long corridor past the venerable New Evolutionist Bible and climbing through the irising door to the Bridge before it was entirely open, and for this Perceval was grateful. The loneliness of command was one thing, and the loneliness of missing your family quite another. And seeing and speaking weren’t the same thing as physical contact, oxytocin, pheromones—the bonding chemicals that managed stress and settled cortisol levels.
Perceval managed her own neurochemistry through her symbiont, but manual manipulation of any system so complex, nuanced, and responsive was inevitably cruder and